Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2012 13:38:16 -0700 From: Gary Kline <kline@thought.org> To: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> Cc: FreeBSD Mailing List <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: editing pdf files Message-ID: <20121013203816.GD14155@ethic.thought.org> In-Reply-To: <20121013131907.c666bfc2.freebsd@edvax.de> References: <5074A6B9.8040209@dreamchaser.org> <5078641D.4050905@passap.ru> <20121012234628.GA11112@ethic.thought.org> <20121013131907.c666bfc2.freebsd@edvax.de>
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On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 01:19:07PM +0200, Polytropon wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Oct 2012 16:46:28 -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
> > ive got a question that fits in here. hopefully.
> >
> > last week I found a book from 1901 that google had scanned and listed
> > as a pdf file. it was text plus photos of the rich/famous of the
> > 1800s. somehow, google found the exact string that matched my great
> > grandfather [from the civil war]. I d'loaded the file (maybe 2mbytes)
> > and searched using acroread. nada. I used the pdftotext utility.
> > same: nothing but some 600 page numbers.
> >
> > my guess is that google just took photos of the book and used other
> > tools to create a pdf file. I am not =that= serious about genealogy,
> > but I would like to know if there are any tools to edit this kind of
> > pdf file.
>
> In case the PDF is nothing more than a compilation of images,
> there's a way to deal with it for editing:
the images in this book aren't what I am interested in.
just text.
>
> step 1: disassemble
> step 2: edit images
> step 3: reassemble
>
> The disassembling can be done with
>
> % pdfimages source.pdf .
>
> Then the files can be edited whatever tool you like, e. g. Gimp.
> They often come out in PBM format.
>
> Finally the images can be re-converted to PDF and combined to one
> PDF file:
>
> for IMG in .*.pbm; do
> convert ${IMG} ${IMG}.pdf
> done
> pdftk .*.pdf output target.pdf
>
> Note the ".*" prefix for the file specification: The images extracted
> by pdfimages match that pattern (at least in the case I tested it for).
> If they get other names than .0000001.pbm, change the approach
> accordingly.
>
turns out that the first roughtly 580 pages are of no interest.
I'll see if tesseract-ocr can get rid of most of the data.
what fmt works best with the ocr suites? or are they about the
same? for the section I got in that 1901 book on my g-grandfather,
it was only about 1.5 pages. there was no photo, just his name
and some bio. Still, things I had no knowledge of. I'm sure
that my father didnt know either!
gary
>
>
> --
> Polytropon
> Magdeburg, Germany
> Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
> Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
--
Gary Kline kline@thought.org http://www.thought.org Public Service Unix
Twenty-six years of service to the Unix community.
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